Why Optimization Is the Last Trap of the Ego
A journey through the seductive world of self-improvement and the wisdom found in letting go
Video Version Here:
OPENING: The Endless Scroll
I used to think I could optimize my way to peace.
Picture this: It's 07:00 AM, and I'm scrolling through X as part of my workflow (I look for interesting posts to respond to and engage with). My feed is a parade of productivity gurus, biohackers with their morning routines, life coaches selling systems, and apps promising to change your life in 21 days.
And I'm thinking: I wouldn't buy any of this.
Not because it's irrelevant. Not because these people don't mean well. But because there's something fundamentally... shallow about it all. Like we've taken the deepest questions of human existence and turned them into clickbait.
That night, staring at my screen, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. What if someone created something with actual depth? What if we refused to offer anything shallow?
What if we built the optimization system to end all optimization systems?
ACT I: THE VISION
In which I design the perfect trap
The Ache Beneath the Scroll
It began the way most modern obsessions do: quietly, compulsively, on a screen.
Scroll. Click. Scan.
Swipe. Snort. Repeat.
A dozen browser tabs open—each one promising a different kind of breakthrough.
“Nervous system mastery in 5 minutes a day.”
“Shadow work for creatives.”
“Flow state secrets they don’t want you to know.”
It was all very... fine.
Competent. Optimized. Market-tested.
But it left me hollow.
What I was feeling wasn’t curiosity. It was hunger.
And none of it was feeding me.
Not the breathwork hacks.
Not the dopamine detox rituals.
Not the productivity porn wrapped in spiritual language.
Something in me whispered:
This isn’t it. This isn’t enough.
And beneath that, a more brutal whisper:
Maybe no one actually knows how to do this.
How to grow.
How to die and be reborn.
How to truly change.
The Dune Moment
And then I remembered Dune.
That wild, dense scripture of human possibility.
I didn’t want a coach—I wanted a Reverend Mother.
Someone who had ingested the poison, stared into their shadow, and come back holy.
If I want a system, I don’t want a mood tracker with pastel gradients and notification badges.
I want Mentat-level mastery.
A living discipline.
A temple built from computation and contemplation.
An order of thinking so rigorous it touches the sacred.
I didn’t want another system—I wanted a mind honed through both logic and surrender.
Not optimized—but initiated.
There’s a moment in Dune where you realize—this isn’t science fiction.
It’s an indictment of how shallow we’ve let ourselves become.
We could build systems that develop the soul.
But instead we build funnels.
We could initiate people into deep self-awareness, emotional intelligence, somatic attunement.
But instead we reward consistency on Notion habit trackers.
Reading Herbert was like brushing up against a parallel timeline where human development was actually taken seriously.
And I couldn’t stop thinking:
Why isn’t it like this?
Why is our world filled with self-help fluff, while the sacred is left to fiction?
Why are our tools so advanced—but our souls so undernourished?
Where is the gravity?
Where are the orders, the disciplines, the systems worthy of reverence?
The gap was unbearable.
So I did what creators do when they feel the ache of the world:
I tried to design my way out of it.
Designing the Temple
So I began sketching.
At first, it was just in my head.
Then scribbled notes.
Then pages.
Then whole frameworks.
A complete human optimization system—
but one that didn’t worship efficiency.
One that honored the soul.
I saw a multi-layered training system—not just another “course,” but a pathway of refinement.
Not something someone “consumes,” but something they survive.
A labyrinth. A forge. A monastery.
Each layer drawing from deep wells—Vedic philosophy, Jungian shadow work, trauma science, cognitive architecture, embodied practice.
The blueprint grew more detailed by the day:
Archetypal maps to track psychic development
Seasonal rhythms that aligned the body with the work
Challenge gates that you couldn’t bypass with intellect alone
Rituals that made integration visceral, not just mental
It wasn’t about content. It was about consequence.
Could I build something that refused to let you hide?
That wouldn’t flatter your ego with “progress,” but would gently (or violently) strip away what wasn’t true?
Every morning I’d wake up with new revelations—ways to encode paradox into the training, ways to keep people from overidentifying with their strengths, ways to disrupt performative “growth” before it took root.
I imagined a structure so rich in complexity, it made traditional coaching look like a toy.
This wouldn’t just help people grow.
It would initiate them.
Training sequences modeled on ancient rites of passage
Cross-disciplinary integrations of philosophy, psychology, somatics, spirituality
Feedback systems that respected depth over speed, being over performance
Every domain of the self—body, mind, emotion, intuition—given a map.
But not just a map. A terrain. A journey. A reckoning.
It felt like I was building something that should already exist.
A sacred dojo. A monastery for misfits.
An ark for those ready to leave behind the shallow.
I’d wake up at 4am, scribbling protocols.
Rewriting archetypal sequences.
Designing not “content,” but rites.
It felt holy.
For a while, I was drunk on devotion.
The High of System-Building
There’s a specific flavor of ecstasy that system-thinkers get addicted to.
It’s not just clarity.
It’s the feeling of divine order—
like you’re glimpsing the machinery behind reality.
A sense that you’re pulling invisible threads together that no one else has seen.
Like you're part of something ancient—but you're the one tasked with bringing it forward.
It’s heady.
And it’s seductive.
It’s not just the pleasure of clarity—it’s the godlike thrill of synthesis.
The moment when scattered pieces begin to cohere.
When the unsolvable finally feels solvable.
When you feel chosen to translate something the world desperately needs.
It’s not arrogance. Not at first. It’s awe.
But awe, unchecked, metastasizes into certainty.
And certainty is the perfect fuel for a beautiful trap.
You start imagining the people who will find this.
The ones who’ve outgrown the shallow.
The ones who’ve tasted pain and want meaning, not just relief.
People who don’t just want success.
They want to become true.
I could see their faces. Hear their testimonials.
“This didn’t teach me how to be better—it taught me how to be real.”
“This wasn’t a course. It was a confrontation.”
“I didn’t graduate—I survived. And I’m grateful.”
That was the dream.
Not to improve lives.
To initiate them.
To become the architect of a system that finally bridged what the world offers and what we actually need.
The Sacred Ego
But then something quieter began to surface.
A hum beneath the brilliance.
A tremor inside the clarity.
What part of me needed to build this?
Was it pure?
Was it love?
Or was it fear—dressed in excellence?
Was it another bid for control?
For superiority?
For immunity?
I didn’t want to look at that.
I was too in it.
Because Act I always feels holy.
The illusion is dressed in sacred robes.
And the ego is clever enough to wear devotion like a mask.
When you're building a ladder to heaven, it's easy to forget...
You might just be running from presence.
ACT II: THE AWAKENING
In which my brilliant idea meets Anthony De Mello
The Book on the Shelf
It had been sitting there for months.
"Awareness" by Anthony De Mello—a small paperback with a plain cover, bought during one of those hopeful frenzies where your future self is a monk with perfect morning routines. It got shelved next to The Untethered Soul, Be Here Now, and that one esoteric tome you never actually opened.
But on that particular afternoon, the noise of my own brilliance began to feel… heavy.
I didn’t decide to read it.
I just reached for it.
As if something older than me knew the next move.
I opened the book and within moments felt a subtle rearranging. Not in my mind—but beneath it.
De Mello wastes no time.
He writes like someone who’s seen through the whole game.
“You keep insisting, ‘I feel good because the world is right.’ Wrong! The world is right because you feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying.”
I read that line three times. Then closed the book.
The silence around me suddenly felt louder. Like I had just stumbled into the real conversation—the one happening underneath everything I’d built.
The First Crack
Another day. Same chair. Book open again. This time, I didn’t resist.
“Most people don’t live aware lives.
They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else’s—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.”
I paused. I knew that life.
I had lived it in the past, but I had also built cleverer versions of it—ones wrapped in self-awareness, good taste, philosophical insight. Systems that looked alive but were still mechanical underneath.
Another line:
“The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness.
But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness—it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness…”
A flash of pleasure followed by weariness.
That hit. Hard.
It described not only relationships, but the arc of every system I had ever built.
The Pattern Exposed
It wasn't the first time I'd built a system that felt like a salvation.
There was the productivity framework I'd spent six months refining—complete with weekly reviews, contextual to-do lists, and a color-coded prioritization schema. I'd pitched it to friends like it was gospel.
Then there was the quantified-self era. Biometrics, fasting windows, heart-rate variability, morning cold plunges with a GoPro on. Every experiment captured in a spreadsheet, every trend line annotated with pride.
Even my spiritual life had entered this orbit:
My journaling practice had an A/B test.
My meditation timer had tags for emotional state.
I once tried to design a Notion board to track “levels of presence.”
There was always the sense that if I could just dial it in—just one more tweak—then I’d finally feel that elusive wholeness. That inner coherence. That sense of stillness and completion I kept reading about in books.
But as I sat there, book in hand, another possibility came into focus—like something long suspected finally stepping into the light.
“You identify with your name, your profession, your country, your beliefs.
You think these things are you.
Strip them away and see what remains.” — Anthony De Mello
I started to realize:
It wasn’t just that I’d built systems.
It was that I’d built an identity around building systems.
The Optimizer.
The Architect of Inner Order.
The Guy Who’s Read All the Right Books and Built a Framework for Every Season of Life.
That persona had gravity. People admired it.
It gave me something to be. Something to perform. Something to hide behind.
Because the truth—if I dared to admit it—was that I often felt lost.
Not obviously lost. Functional lost. High-performing lost.
But underneath it all, I was still chasing peace the way others chase success.
A New Kind of Mirror
That evening, I sat quietly—no system, no input, no improvement plan. Just me.
The contrast was jarring.
For all the time I had spent building, I had rarely just been.
No optimization lens. No timeline. No future goal. Just now.
Later that day, I read another passage:
“You have to understand that the shortest distance between truth and yourself is not thought, not effort, not action, not intention.
It is awareness.”
Not effort.
Not even good effort.
Not mystical journaling.
Not therapeutic breakthroughs.
Not hours of noble struggle to find the right path.
Just awareness.
It felt too simple. Too direct.
Too humbling.
Because awareness doesn’t flatter you.
It doesn’t reward cleverness.
It doesn’t care how articulate your inner monologue is.
It simply shows you what’s true—right now.
Without your consent.
And I realized something terrifying:
I was afraid of presence.
Because presence cannot be controlled.
It cannot be improved.
It doesn’t produce ROI.
It doesn’t care how brilliant your model is.
Presence asks everything of you.
And gives you nothing to grasp.
De Mello again:
“You’re not depressed. You’re not broken. You’re just asleep. And when you wake up, the world will look different, even though nothing has changed.”
It wasn’t that my system was bad.
It was that the place it was coming from was still rooted in the very thing it claimed to transcend.
The Sacred Escape
So I sat with the question that now refused to leave me:
What if my desire to create the perfect optimization system was just another form of spiritual avoidance?
What if my elaborate structures were no different from someone binge-watching Netflix or doomscrolling Twitter?
One is glamorous, the other is pitied.
But both are forms of unconsciousness.
Both are attempts to not feel this moment.
“If what you seek is truth, there is one thing you must have above all else: an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.”
Was I ready to be wrong?
Wrong about this whole quest?
Wrong about the beauty of the structure?
Wrong about the purity of my intention?
Was I ready to lose the brilliance I had built?
So I sat again. No framework. Just breath.
And I watched.
I watched as my mind frantically tried to turn the present moment into a self-improvement strategy:
Maybe I could write about this.
Maybe I should document this discomfort.
Maybe there’s a framework in here for feeling the now more deeply.
It was absurd.
And it was honest.
I laughed at myself. Then I felt a quiet grief.
Not the loud grief of failure.
The quiet grief of realizing how many years I had been orbiting around a center I’d never actually touched.
The Final Blow
Then I found this line—tucked in plain sight:
“People mistakenly believe that if they had more time, they’d be more spiritual, or more happy. But they don’t realize that the obstacle is not time. The obstacle is their attachments.”
The pattern wasn’t just building systems.
It was believing they would save me.
It was outsourcing the responsibility of presence to architecture.
It was worshipping the idea of peace while avoiding the actual experience of it—which is often unstructured, unproductive, and deeply inconvenient.
The system was just a dream.
And I was starting to wake up.
I had become attached to my idea of depth.
To my identity as a system-builder.
To the fantasy that I could design my way into grace.
But grace isn’t engineered.
It’s received.
It doesn’t come through force, or strategy.
It comes through surrender.
That was the trap.
Not that I’d built a system.
But that I’d mistaken it for the answer.
ACT III: THE UNRAVELING
In which we discover how deep this goes
Taking Inventory
I started taking inventory—not a mental checklist, but a soul-level audit.
What had I actually been doing all these years?
Downloading meditation apps instead of sitting in silence.
Reading books about presence while mentally outlining next week’s goals.
Designing rituals not to meet the moment, but to domesticate it.
Buying courses I never finished, not because they weren’t good, but because the part of me that bought them wasn’t actually ready to change.
I realized I’d developed a highly functional addiction:
Not to dopamine or distraction, but to becoming.
To the self-image of someone who was always evolving. Always in progress. Always just one more refinement away from arriving.
I’d been treating transformation like a subscription service—auto-renewed, never fulfilled.
“We love progress because it protects us from the terror of stillness.”
I thought I was walking a spiritual path.
But I was just looping a polished version of the same cycle.
Trading old distractions for new ones with better branding.
And even now—this exact project, this essay, this act of self-inquiry—I could feel the temptation rising again:
To package it.
To share it.
To leverage it.
As if insight only counted once it had been turned into content.
The Cultural Mirror
And it’s not just me.
It’s the water we swim in.
We’ve built an entire culture on the subtle violence of never being enough.
Everywhere you look: Optimize. Upgrade. Uplevel.
From inbox zero to morning routines, from dopamine detoxes to life hacks.
The vibe is constant: You’re close, but not quite there yet.
And the irony?
The people building these tools are often the most unwell.
Founders burning out from their own focus apps.
Mindfulness influencers spiraling from the pressure to stay relevant.
Coaches who haven’t sat still long enough to know who they are without a niche.
We’ve industrialized the quest for peace.
We track our stillness, schedule our solitude, and publish our breakthroughs before we’ve metabolized them.
“In an age of performance, even healing becomes a performance.”
We want awakening, but we want it neatly integrated into our calendars.
We want God, but on our terms.
We want peace—but only if we can control how it shows up.
And beneath it all is the same illusion:
That who you are now is a problem to be solved.
The Creator’s Dilemma
Which brings me back to the most sobering truth:
I was doing it again.
Designing a system to free people from systems… while quietly reinforcing my own.
I wanted to build a training that would end in letting go, but I couldn’t stop perfecting it.
I wanted to point people toward stillness, but I couldn’t stop moving.
I wanted to offer something sacred, but I was already strategizing the launch.
The line between transmission and performance was razor-thin.
Could I create something that invited surrender without becoming seduction?
Could I build a system whose purpose was to make itself irrelevant?
I remembered a line from Chögyam Trungpa:
“The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”
Was I just building a more elegant cage?
One that looked like freedom, felt like insight, but kept me orbiting the same core wound:
I am not okay as I am.
Because even the noble desire to help others can become corrupted when it’s secretly about proving your own worth.
The Deeper Recognition
Eventually, all roads led back to one recognition:
The thing I was chasing had never been out there.
Not in books.
Not in frameworks.
Not even in “awareness.”
De Mello wrote:
“Holiness is not something you acquire. Holiness is a discovery. It is not an achievement, it is a realization.”
It felt less like learning something new and more like uncovering something ancient—something that had always been here, under the noise, under the striving.
What if peace isn’t a reward?
What if it’s the absence of the war we’re always waging with ourselves?
What if presence isn’t earned?
What if it’s what remains when the performance collapses?
What if the deepest practice isn’t building something better,
…but watching what arises when you stop building altogether?
Because maybe the soul doesn’t need an upgrade.
Maybe it just needs space.
INTERLUDE: THE GAP
Before the surrender, there is silence.
There is a moment in every unraveling where the machinery winds down—but before anything new begins.
The gears stop turning.
The vision board fades.
The timeline goes blank.
Even the desire to improve grows quiet.
Not because it’s been defeated,
but because it’s been seen.
And what’s left?
A peculiar emptiness.
Not dramatic. Not tragic.
Just... still.
A kind of sacred disorientation.
As if the mind is waiting for instructions it no longer believes in.
For me, it felt like this:
I stopped writing.
I stopped building.
I stopped trying to turn every insight into a tool.
I didn’t know what was next.
I only knew I couldn’t go back.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
This was not a moment of clarity.
It was a moment of non-doing.
Of learning to sit inside the pause.
There’s a strange kind of grief that comes when the engine of self-improvement powers down.
Because for so long, the striving was your identity.
Without it, who are you?
No one, for a while.
And maybe that’s the point.
To become no one long enough
for something deeper to surface.
ACT IV: THE INTEGRATION
In which we don’t solve the paradox but learn to dance with it
The Honest Question
So let me ask you—plainly, without the sales page glow:
Would you submit to a Mentat training if its final exam was surrender?
Would you pay for a course whose closing slide simply says, “Now forget everything we taught you”?
Would you devote months to mastering a framework that ends by handing you a match and asking you to burn the framework down?
Because I suspect this is what we’re truly after:
Not better, slicker ways to upgrade ourselves, but permission to drop the whole upgrade mentality and just exist—un-optimized, un-improved, un-performative, shockingly alive.
What This Actually Looks Like
I’m not preaching a monastic bonfire of all your tools.
Keep your calendar app. Track your macros if you must.
But notice the texture of your motive.
Open the productivity dashboard—sense whether you’re using it to choose the next truly meaningful action, or to anesthetize the discomfort of momentary aimlessness.
Swallow the supplement stack—and watch if, in that swallow, you’re trying to engineer your way out of grief, boredom, or the dull ache of being mortal.
Read the book, hire the coach—but feel the subtle tremor inside: Is this curiosity, or is this my old fear wearing a new outfit?
The wise response isn’t to smash the instruments; it’s to hold them lightly enough that they can fall from your hand the moment they stop helping.
Living the Paradox
Yes, I still run frameworks.
I still love a good checklist—and a clean Notion database makes me purr.
But now they’re means, not meaning.
If the map helps me walk, great.
If the map starts to feel holier than the terrain, I crumple it without ceremony.
The difference is microscopic from the outside, monumental on the inside:
It’s the switch from “This will save me” to “This might serve me—until it doesn’t.”
The Meta-Recognition
Even this newsletter flirts with the same trap: turning illumination into intellectual merch.
Insight becomes content; content begets metrics; metrics whisper ever more subtle demands to optimize.
I catch myself mid-paragraph—Look, another iteration of the pattern.
Smile, breathe, continue writing anyway, but with an open palm.
Because that’s the work now:
Not annihilating the pattern (good luck)
but noticing it earlier, bowing to it, and letting it pass without hijacking the wheel.
“Awareness is not the elimination of darkness; it is the lamp that lets you see.”
CLOSING: The Anti-Invitation
No, I don’t have a sign-up.
No, I’m not going to push you to an upsell funnel cunningly disguised as a “free gift.”
I would, however, like to provoke you:
Tomorrow, fast from optimization.
No habit apps, no podcasts at 1.5× speed, no mental tallying of steps, reps, or insights.
Let the day be an untended garden. Watch what grows.
Maybe boredom. Maybe terror. Maybe wonder.
Maybe you’ll discover that life, left un-optimized, is still weirdly generous.
And if by nightfall you feel the itch to rebuild the cage—fine. Rebuild.
But do it knowing it’s a choice, not a compulsion.
Training Beyond Optimization is quietly gestating in the background.
If—and only if—you feel genuinely pulled, you’ll find it in time.
But you might discover you no longer need it, and that would delight me more than any launch metric ever could.
The optimization engine will rev up soon enough.
For now, may this pause be enough.
Thank you for reading.
If this resonated, perhaps close the tab, step outside, and let the sky be your only tracking device for a while.